How metal got serious
Thoughts inspired by the publication of the Cambridge Companion to Metal Music
The following was first published in the 21 September 2023 issue of Prospect magazine’s Culture newsletter.
The Cambridge Companion to Metal Music is an audacious title for a scholarly tome. The conceit that the study of heavy metal should be immortalised in a book, released a few weeks ago, by a prestigious university press is one that risks ridicule in some quarters and outrage in others. This is, after all, a genre that has historically been dismissed by the left for its bovine, white masculinity and by the right as an assault on Christ.
That widespread dismissal is one of the reasons why I—an overly sensitive, lefty, middle-class Jewish kid—was embarrassed to admit I loved metal for much of my childhood. Unlearning that shame took time, but it has also been the greatest cultural and intellectual adventure of my life.
It had already become clear by the late 1980s that metal was a much more diverse and creative genre than its sneering detractors ever imagined. The global metal underground that emerged during that decade built a thriving international network of bands, tape traders, fanzine writers, all bound together (pre-internet) by letters and parcels. Decentralised and relatively egalitarian, metal was one of the only scenes where a band from Peru or the former Eastern Bloc could get their music heard and loved worldwide.
While mainstream metal in the 1980s often came to be defined by a decadence that soon exhausted itself, the underground birthed a whole range of “extreme” metal genres that, in their thrilling unlistenability, touched the face of the avant-garde. That was what drew me in: through John Peel’s BBC Radio 1 show I first heard Napalm Death’s anarcho-blast, Carcass’s chaotic gore and Bolt Thrower’s sludgy grind. Other discoveries followed, many of them grimily obscure.
I would have stayed “just” a fan if it weren’t for the accidental discovery, sometime during my undergraduate degree in the early 1990s, that Popular Music Studies was a thing. Browsing in my university library, I came across serious scholarly books and journals that engaged with the music of my era. I quickly devoured the early classics of the discipline by authors such as Simon Frith, as well as related Cultural Studies texts by the likes of Dick Hebdige and Stuart Hall. I ended up writing my BA dissertation on alternative music scenes and, by the time I graduated, was set on doing a PhD in the sociology of extreme metal.
Where was the metal literature, though? Unfortunately, most popular music scholars were suspicious of metal until relatively recently. In the 1990s, I did read pathbreaking monographs by Deena Weinstein and Robert Walser. But during my PhD research at Goldsmiths, I reconciled myself to the inevitability that neither my supervisor nor even the scholars I met at Popular Music Studies conferences would know much about my field.
I finished my PhD in 2001 and my book based on my research, Extreme Metal: Music and Culture on the Edge came out in 2007. By then, something was stirring; online culture made it possible to find a few academic peers who took metal seriously. But the real breakthrough was in 2008, when the British academic Niall Scott organised the first international metal conference, held in Salzburg. To the astonishment of everyone attending (most of whom had paid their own way without university support), there were dozens of us.
From that beginning, Metal Studies exploded into life. Further conferences built an international network that eventually birthed the International Society for Metal Music Studies. By now, dozens of monographs and collections have been published, hundreds of journal articles (including in the journal Metal Music Studies) and untold numbers of PhDs.
I am proud to be part of this fully fledged subdiscipline. In particular, I am proud that Metal Studies has never been what some might imagine it to be: a bunch of ageing fanboys seeking an academic imprimatur for their tastes. Not only is metal scholarship often informed by feminist, queer and postcolonial theory, it has never shied away from the less palatable side of metal. In fact, given that many metal scholars are involved in metal scenes, Metal Studies has been part of a concerted pushback against racism, sexism and other forms of hate within those scenes.
Metal studies scholars are often engaged scholars. And for Cambridge University Press to publish a collection of cutting-edge scholarship on metal is not a sign of a retreat into an ivory tower, but a recognition of the vitality and quality of the discipline. It’s true that there might be legitimate concerns about the fragmentation of academia into highly specialised subdisciplines. In this case, though, not only is metal a global culture in which millions are involved, scholars in other subdisciplines have much to learn from the community that Metal Studies has built.
I do concede this, though: Metal Studies scholars are invariably passionate fans. More than that: there are plenty of musicians among them. The following playlist showcases some of their work. It makes for a wonderfully diverse musical smorgasbord: